Very important. 16gb Sony Flash drive just stopped working.

[zionosis]

Alright so I was on the flash drive and I right clicked a folder and it said it had like 17gb of data in it. Keep in mind I have other data on there also. I was thinking this is screwy I will pull it out and put it back in. But once I did that the flash drive doesn't work anymore.

The light on it glows in and out and the sound happens when you plug a USB device in so the computer recognizes something. But in my computer all that comes up is "E: removable disk" and if you click on it to open it just says "Please insert a disk into Removable disk E:".

I can right click on it and there it says 0 bytes. I can go to disk management and it doesn't even come up anywhere.

I have tried Data recovery tools and none work.

What do I do?
I had so much stuff on there. I have maybe 30% of it backed up on another flash drive but I never expected this to happen and I hope somehow someway I can get my data back.

Surely other people have had this exact problem.

I also plugged it into another computer and the same things happens.

I really don't want to format but I can't anyway. I right clicked on it and clicked format and it say "There is no disk in disk E etc"

 

[Boogieman_WD]

Hey there zionosis.
If it's not recognized in disk management when you connect it to your computer, have you checked, if it appears in Disk Management when you connected the pen drive to the other computer? If it is recognized, then you could try changing the USB flash drive's letter to see if this helps you resolve the issue: How to change the drive letter assignment in Windows 8, 7, Vista, XP or 2000
You shouldn't try to format the USB stick if you want to have a better chance of recovering the data. If the option with the drive letter is a no-go, you could try accessing the USB flash drive via Linux Live CD/USB to see if it's recognized properly and if you can get to your data. If that doesn't help either, I don't know what recovery options you've already tried, but here's a thread which has a few more possible solutions - hopefully one of them does the trick: http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/forum/id-1644496/lost-data-recovery.html

Hope that helps.
Boogieman_WD

 

[zionosis]

Hey there zionosis.
If it's not recognized in disk management when you connect it to your computer, have you checked, if it appears in Disk Management when you connected the pen drive to the other computer? If it is recognized, then you could try changing the USB flash drive's letter to see if this helps you resolve the issue: How to change the drive letter assignment in Windows 8, 7, Vista, XP or 2000
You shouldn't try to format the USB stick if you want to have a better chance of recovering the data. If the option with the drive letter is a no-go, you could try accessing the USB flash drive via Linux Live CD/USB to see if it's recognized properly and if you can get to your data. If that doesn't help either, I don't know what recovery options you've already tried, but here's a thread which has a few more possible solutions - hopefully one of them does the trick: http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/forum/id-1644496/lost-data-recovery.html

Hope that helps.
Boogieman_WD

Nah it's totally destroyed. I have looked in depth to the problem and it's just a nand fail apparently.

I cannot get the Data back. Luckily I have an amazing recover software "Remo" and I got most of my data back off a hard drive which was used before to copy at least most of the data to that flash drive and then I deleted it off the hard drive.
Well not all but at least 80% was recovered.


Now I bought more flash drives and I have them set up with a sync program so they always duplicate to the other flash drive. So now if one ever fails I haven't lost my data and will have another flash drive identical.

Then in that case I will buy another flash drive again if that happens and use my backup flash drive and copy it all on the new flashdive and carry on.

I doubt both will ever fail around the same time so a 2 flash drive setup should do.

I do this with everything now. My music, etc. Everything. Two disk or two flashdrives for each and if one fails I don't use the other until the new one that I buy comes in just to make sure.

 

[Boogieman_WD]

Good job on recovering most of your data.
It's very wise to keep backups of your important files. This sounds like a nice option, although I personally wouldn't go for flash drives as a backup solution.
A backup is considered when you have two copies of the original data, stored on different locations, so it sounds like you're pretty close to that description. If the files are really important to you, you could also use a cloud service to back them up.

Cheers!
Boogieman_WD